Diving into BoardGameGeek • Hacker News Board

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#101

Post by asgardian28 » Tue, Jan 25, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

sWW26 wrote: post #60

praash wrote: post #11

This analysis is clever! I'd love to see someone use these ideas in an interactive tool for board game discovery. Geeks appreciating complexity is obvious, but it's very interesting to see how much it actually matters in ratings. Some mechanic complexity is essential for replayability and depth, but maximizing the potential of individual components is a sign of great game design. Many successful games usually fit the…

I built a recommendation engine[0] using the BoardGameGeek data with the methods described in Significance[1]. I've also extended it[2] relatively recently to have a tweakable ranking system which my father explains here[3] [0] https://trythesegames.com/ [1] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.... [2] https://trythesegames.com/rankings [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2728398/flexible-boar…

Really nice! As an extension to the article, I'm also making a recommender, but just colab filtering. But yours looks stellar! And the article is great, compliments!

Need some time to let the like score calculation sink in :-) I'm going to experiment with the (rating * 2) / 100, seems like a great way to account for the nonlinearity. Btw don't you divide by 10 instead of 100?

Another suggestion was to take transform the ratings of each user to percentiles, as a measure of how favorite the game is to the user, also seems interesting.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#102

Post by asgardian28 » Tue, Jan 25, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

asgardian28 wrote: post #98

fridek wrote: post #19

Interesting analysis. It has some signs of the author introducing variables until the ranking looks "right" though. I also disagree with some of the conclusions, based on my moderate experience with the site and its users. A few suggestions to improve: * Consider that most users rank 1-10 to stack rank their own games. BGG explicilty encourages this, insisting it's YOUR rating and there is no wrong way of arriving at…

The rank percentile is a great suggestion and after that take the average rank I guess? Ratings per year is a possibility. Complexity: Indeed I wanted to remove some of the more complex games because I don't have time for them. Although on reddit there was a nice discussion that the weight is composed of complexity & depth

An second thought the rank percentile would be heavily influenced by the amount of ratings given per user. If you rate only 3 games you think are great with high ratings, then one of them is going to recieve an awful percentile.

The same 3 great games rated by someone with 5000 ratings will have much 'better' percentiles, just because all the crap games.

And all the shades in between.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#103

Post by mercutio2 » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 1:32 AM UTC

anonymoushn wrote: post #88

mercutio2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not disagree more about Res Arcana. I would put it first in my list of games that hold up when attempting to win. Are you playing it with serious gamers? It has about the highest return to skill of any short game I know these days except Race. A key test: do any of your games ever take more than 4 rounds to someone winning? If so, your group hasn’t gotten very deep in it yet.

I've been around the top of the BGA leaderboard for this game. It's mostly about being Witch, buying PoPs in round 1, and trying to grab Reanimate. BGA players taught me that the game contained even less slack than I thought by opening with round 1 turn 1 alchemize, round 1 turn 2 buy alchemist's tower, which I eventually adopted. It feels like a lot of the variety in the game should come from the 8 cards in your dec…

OK! Well, I guess it comes down to what you mean by "completely collapse". I enjoy the BGA leaderboards, but only got to the top 50 or so when I was actively trying.

I agree that you're going to discard 3/4 of your artifacts, and ~50% of them are almost never worth playing. But I've been continuously surprised by people pulling out wins with PoP/artifact combinations I didn't expect to be viable.

If your definition of "completely collapses" is "some paths are much better than others in high level play", then I guess we just disagree on what makes a good heavy board game.

I do agree with you that Wingspan has a corvidae problem, though; I've never seen anyone but a beginner lose with an early raven.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#104

Post by anonymoushn » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 2:54 AM UTC

mercutio2 wrote: post #103

anonymoushn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been around the top of the BGA leaderboard for this game. It's mostly about being Witch, buying PoPs in round 1, and trying to grab Reanimate. BGA players taught me that the game contained even less slack than I thought by opening with round 1 turn 1 alchemize, round 1 turn 2 buy alchemist's tower, which I eventually adopted. It feels like a lot of the variety in the game should come from the 8 cards in your dec…

OK! Well, I guess it comes down to what you mean by "completely collapse". I enjoy the BGA leaderboards, but only got to the top 50 or so when I was actively trying. I agree that you're going to discard 3/4 of your artifacts, and ~50% of them are almost never worth playing. But I've been continuously surprised by people pulling out wins with PoP/artifact combinations I didn't expect to be viable. If your definition o…

From my PoV it's not "some paths are much better than others" so much as "almost all of the paths are not worth taking." The game feels really centralized around the 3 best PoPs and some Athanor/Philosopher's Stone gameplans (though other stuff can win and it's always fun to see that). I can't call any mages *blank* in the same way I can call some Roll starting devs blank, but your Druid is just not expected to have a great time against a Witch or Duelist or even a Seer.

This is all subjective, of course. The Splendor designers obviously intended for players who purchase a large number of small holdings to be able to win. Every variant in the expansion works to address this issue. Another player could reasonably say "Splendor has failed because everyone just rushes to buy about 2 big holdings." To me, "Splendor but everyone goes for big holdings right away" is still pretty good at being Splendor. "Res Arcana but you rush a PoP and get like 8 VPs from it and 2 from a monument" feels disappointing compared to the game I thought I would be playing. I'm glad you like it! A friend tells me the 2nd expansion makes a lot of things better, so I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#105

Post by quartesixte » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

Oddskar wrote: post #93

quartesixte wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, you can teach it completely “right” and the audience might still find it utterly dull. Coup vs Resistance is, surprisingly, a very good barometer for the kind of group a group is.

Can you elaborate on the coup vs resistance thing? Sounds interesting.

Coup and Resistance, while both games of deception and social engineering, differ in how their deception plays out.

Coup’s deception is confrontational. On every turn you facedown an opponent and challenge them to a guessing game directly. The game relies on you deceiving others to perform actions optimally. If no one lies or no one confronts anyone’s lies, the game ends very quickly.

Resistance’s is less confrontational. Your goal is to evade detection and deceive the group as a whole. In addition, not everyone needs to lie. If you aren’t assigned the role of a spy, you are spared the act of deceiving the group.

I have found that this results in two polar opposites of player groups. A group of players who aren’t confrontational in nature find Coup lackluster because everyone just settles into an optimal or suboptimal strategy and the game ends without much fanfare.

Resistance on the other hand, bores players who want to challenge each other. Be dealt the wrong role and they find themselves just sitting around for 15 minutes. Yes the accusation and voting rounds provide some entertainment, but it just isn’t the same.

This is all anecdata of course. I like both games, and admittedly I might be stuck in some kind of local maxima due to my own personality and personal history defining the kind of people I play games with.

As a final parting thought: Coup with a mix of highly confrontational and pacifist players also never goes well either.